The
Final Rite of WarNew
Generation Receives 'Ultimate Honor' of Arlington Burial

By
Sue Anne PressleyCourtesy
of The Washington PostSunday,
April 27, 2003

It
was the busiest week of the war at Arlington National Cemetery: One by
one, young men who had died in Iraq were honored and buried last week,
here amid the white marble stones that mark the losses from every other
American conflict.

By
Friday, there were seven new graves of the war dead -- eight, counting
the 25-year-old airman who died when his helicopter crashed in Afghanistan.
In all, 17 fatalities from Iraq are being interred at Arlington.

Even
as the fighting winds down and public attention wanders elsewhere, the
final business of war is taking place in this country's preeminent military
cemetery.

"We
as a nation, we as a conscience, owe these people the dignity and respect
that they've earned, and that's what we try to translate here at Arlington,"
said Thomas L. Sherlock, the cemetery's historian for 28 years. "Hopefully,
when the families of these people come back years later, they can have
a sense of that pride, and as time goes by, we can be part of the healing
process. Because we can guarantee that their loved ones will never be forgotten."

Certainly,
funerals are a common occurrence at Arlington, where 285,000 people have
been laid to rest since 1864. Every weekday, about 25 additional people
are buried on the immaculate green lawns dotted with cherry and crabapple
trees. But in peacetime, these burials usually involve older veterans who
have lived out their years and often have few survivors. In contrast, the
services last week in some cases drew several hundred people, including
military personnel in uniform mourning the loss of a fellow service member.
The youngest of the dead was 23; the oldest, 31.

When
workers using front-end loaders and other heavy equipment finished covering
a grave after one service last week, they immediately turned to digging
up the adjacent plot for the next fatality waiting to be buried. As the
U.S. Army Band departed after playing "America the Beautiful" at an Army
Captain's service, it was replaced by the U.S. Navy Band, which played
the same song for a fallen Navy pilot. The Iraq fatalities are being buried
together, in an expanse of ground northwest of the Pentagon.

But
the pace has been nothing compared with that of the Vietnam War, of course.
At the height of that fighting, in 1967 and 1968, Sherlock said, it was
not uncommon to bury two or three combat fatalities a day, and sometimes
more. About 8,000 Vietnam War dead are interred there, Sherlock said.

For
most military personnel, Arlington remains the resting place of heroes,
and many of the most recent wartime fatalities had requested burial there
on forms they were required to complete before being deployed.

Air
Force Staff Sergeant Jason C. Hicks had long
ago made his wishes clear. Hicks, 25, of Pageland, South Carolina, was
one of six Air Force members killed March 23 when their HH-60 Pave Hawk
helicopter went down in a thunderstorm in Afghanistan during a rescue effort.
On Tuesday, he was buried, as he had wished, at Arlington, with several
hundred friends and relatives in attendance.

"It
was Jason's decision," said his sister, Janet Barbee, 31, of Monroe, North
Carolina. "He always said that was the ultimate honor, the most heroic
place to be laid to rest if he died in that way. The family could have
overruled his decision if we had wanted to, but we would never do that."

Arlington
was designated for the war dead. On June 15, 1864, when it must have seemed
as if the deaths from the Civil War would never stop coming, President
Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war named the original 200 acres as a cemetery
for the military. Creation of the cemetery was also a slap in the face
of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who had lived there before the war;
the federal government had seized the property. In time, the cemetery grew
to the present 625 acres.

Soldiers
from the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were reburied there about
1900. And today, any grieving family can be reassured that the standard-honors
ceremony is little different from that given a soldier of World War I --
a uniformed casket team, a team that fires off a volley of shots, the flag
over the coffin folded and presented to the family, the bugler playing
taps. There is no cost for the ceremony, the grave site, the tombstone
or maintenance.

"We
talk about the American melting pot. Well, this is a melting pot as well,"
Sherlock said. "I call it democracy in death."

Generals
and Privates get the same white stone, he said, and officers are intermingled
among the rank-and-file enlisted members. A tour of Arlington also offers
a history of U.S. wars and a realization that the nation's youth have always
sacrificed their lives for their country.

"I
can walk through the cemetery and see a headstone with the date June 1944
and the person was 25 years old, and I know they died in the [Allied] invasion
of Europe," Sherlock said. "It personalizes it, and for a moment then,
when we stop and read that name, we make them immortal."

As
last week's services were underway, tour buses kept at a respectful distance.
The news media were out in force, recording the private losses from another
U.S. war. "When the family starts putting roses on the grave and lingers,
cut your cameras off. Give them a few minutes of peace," a cemetery spokeswoman
instructed the television and print photographers. "If you can even look
the other way, that would be good."

As
Janet Barbee sat in the family row of green folding chairs, as a chill
wind whipped through the graveyard, she thought about her little brother
-- how he had loved being a volunteer firefighter in their tiny home town,
then how he had loved being in the Air Force. She looked out over the rows
and rows of plain white markers, and she felt somehow reassured. This was
what her brother had wanted; it was the last thing his family and his country
could do for him.

"I
agree with Jason now," Barbee said after she had returned home. "It is
an honor to be laid beside all the other heroes -- if it weren't for all
those soldiers there, we wouldn't be living in the free world we live in
today. We have all of them to thank for that."